What it pays
From £35,751 for project support officers to £59,834 for business and financial project management professionals.
Median gross annual pay, full-time employees. Each figure belongs to the occupation beside it. There is no average across a profession, because none is measured.
-
Business and financial project management professionals
£59,834 -
IT project managers
£58,373 -
Project support officers
£35,751
Bars are drawn to scale from zero.
ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, 2025 (provisional), from the April 2025 survey. Open Government Licence v3.0.
The jobs it covers
5 occupations sit in this profession, on the government’s own classification. Each one is a page: what the work involves, what you decide, and how you are measured.
How you get into it
Almost nobody starts here. It is a second profession, entered from whatever is being delivered: IT, finance, operations, marketing. Usually you are the person who kept the last one on track.
Project support and PMO roles are the one genuine entry point, and they are a real route rather than an administrative siding.
The recognised qualifications matter more here than in most families, because the work is otherwise hard to evidence: the deliverable belongs to somebody else.
Who employs it
Any organisation that changes anything, which is all of them. What differs is whether projects are how the work is done or an interruption to it.
Consultancies, IT and financial services run permanent project functions with their own career paths. Elsewhere it is often a role somebody holds in addition to their own.
The public sector runs the largest and most scrutinised programmes in the country, with governance to match.
What to expect
Responsibility arrives before authority, and that is the defining feature of the job rather than a complaint about it. You are accountable for people you cannot instruct.
The ladder runs project, programme, portfolio, and each step is more about money and politics and less about delivery.
It is one of the more transferable families here: the method travels between sectors far better than the domain knowledge does.
The professional body
APM
The Association for Project Management, the chartered body for the profession. Not an awarding body we hold qualifications from, so this links out only.